One of the best compliments I ever got was when I was about 18, in high school. A guy whom I sort of knew from classes was, for reasons I can no longer remember, motivated to say to me, "Someday, you're going to be famous and I'm going to be able to say I knew you." The compliment itself is pretty great, but what made it even more meaningful to me was the fact that it came from a guy who was pretty popular at the time. Because I definitely wasn't. I'm not going to get into specifics here, but I was not interested in earning the adulation of my classmates and made no effort to better my image in their eyes. I have no patience for drug-addled, empty-headed twits so it was unfortunate that they comprised most of my senior class. This guy Jay may or may not have been into weekend chemistry, but he certainly wasn't empty-headed.
So it is with great sadness that I must now make the following announcement. Jay, I'm sorry, but I will never be famous. Ever.
This is not a fear or a prediction. It is a vow.
The back story (yes there's a story, of course there's a story) goes like this. Last week, an outdoor ice skating rink opened right across the street from my office. It's great. It's about 60 degrees outside, which makes it perfect skating weather. I've been spending every possible lunch hour skating since it opened.
Either no one has figured out that it's open, or San Franciscans just don't skate because my blade-footed compatriots have topped out at a grand total of 5. There's nothing quite like having a rink pretty much all to myself to mess around in. It spoils me to no end, and I can't get enough of it.
The pesky downside of all this is that this rink is situated in a small park, next to a bunch of lunch spots and outdoor tables. And wouldn't you know it, my lunch hour coincides with everyone else's lunch hour. My skating time is a floor show for a bunch of tie-strangled yuppies shoveling bad pizza and worse teriyaki into their mouths in a manner reminiscent of a shop-vac attacking a pile of compost.
And they are not alone. Not even close. They are joined by the Dreaded Photo Students.
Let's back up a bit and lay down some small but crucial background information. I don't like being stared at. It makes me really uncomfortable, because for one thing, I never know why it happens. If I notice that I'm attracting undue attention, I'll do the usual inventory of teeth-checking and hair smoothing and clothes-examination and then I'll still have no answers. Of course the only reasonable response on my part is to delve deep into the bowels of the human psyche in a vaguely directed attempt to figure out what mental process would trigger this sort of unabashed ocular vulgarity, and that never leads anywhere good. My understanding of the human condition as it applies to the rest of the population is, at best, one step removed from popular consensus. (in a rare and ultimately doomed attempt to explain my outlook on life to one of my friends, I once said, "It's a real trip, being me." Basically, I meant that fairly often, and we're talking several times a day here, I'll reflect on something I've just said or done and go What the f...? Who DOES this? Like the time I hiked to the top of the really big and really sandy hill on Ocean Beach in my new black velvet trench coat. Or for that matter, the fact that I own a black velvet trench coat with a leopard print lining. What the f...?) Anyway. The point is that I start trying to deconstruct the mental states of random crazy people and that never goes anywhere good. I don't come up with healthy, normal lines of reasoning like, for example, the fact that I might be attractive to at least some of them. Or now, with the short and blue zebra striped hair, a bit distinctive. Oh no. No, I conjure up such searingly sensible hypotheses as...actually, no I don't. I never actually come up with a reason. I just wonder. And it creeps me out.
And now, back to the Dreaded Photo Students, whom, you'll recall, prompted this whole train of thought in the first place. As bad as the staring is, it is sickeningly amplified in conjunction with a telephoto camera lens. Because people with cameras pan. Panning, for those less literate in the intricacies of photography, is a technique employed in the photographing of a moving subject. If part of the frame are moving sufficiently fast, they will blur when captured on film. If you hold the camera still, your subject will blur. And this is no good. You will end up with a beautifully exposed background and a big smudge in the middle. So the alternative is to follow the subject with your camera, and you will get the opposite effect: your background will blur but your subject will be in focus.
Returning from the world of photo theory to real life, this means when I am skating, there are a bunch of very obvious camera lenses following my every move. And, let us not forget that I am a Student Of Art. (Real life was fun, wasn't it? Leave it behind, as you are about to violently catapulted into the World Of Art.) In case you have been negligent in your art theory studies in recent years, the current trend is to attribute a phallic subtext to everything. And not just everything in art. Nonono, absolutely everything. Neckties, the Washington Monument, umbrellas, wine bottles... clearly, clearly, these are artifacts of a misogynistic male-dominated society in which the number one aesthetic priority is to constantly assert the superiority and ubiquitousness of the male apparatus. Now, armed with your new knowledge of the number one guiding principle of product design for the last 300 years, reconsider my experience of being obviously panned by something like twenty very long and sizable camera lenses. Got it? Yeah. It's a real trip being me.
And this is just my experience. Now imagine what it must be like to be, say, Nancy Kerrigan. The camera lenses must number in the thousands. Celebrity is for other people. People who are more equipped to handle thousands of phallic camera lenses.
